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Reflection AI unveils Beam, a 501B-parameter open-weight model

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Brooklyn-based startup Reflection AI on Monday, 5 October 2026, unveiled Beam, its first frontier open-weight model, claiming it matches leading Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks at much lower cost, TechCrunch reported. The company set out the details in a long blog post, confirming weekend reporting by Axios that a launch was close.

What Beam is

Beam is a text-only mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion parameters, of which 23 billion are active at a time. It was pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens and has a one-million-token context window. Reflection says it was trained with high-compute reinforcement learning to handle reasoning, coding and agentic tasks at “a fraction of the token cost and inference time compute” of rivals.

On advanced reasoning benchmarks, the company says Beam scores on par with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and outperforms leading Western open models while using “3-4x less inference compute”. TechCrunch noted that these claims have not been independently verified. Reflection calls Beam a “workhorse model” for enterprises, the public sector and developers.

A Western answer to Chinese open-weight models

The launch could intensify the race to build a Western alternative to DeepSeek, Qwen and Z.ai. Reflection’s most direct US rival may be Inkling, the open model released in July by Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab. Reflection’s own figures show Beam ahead of Inkling on four coding tests where both report results, though Inkling is multimodal and Beam handles only text.

Reflection was founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers and has raised about $4.7 billion from backers including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to PitchBook. This summer it signed deals worth more than $7 billion with SpaceX and Nebius for access to Nvidia GB300 chips through 2029.

Weights due this month

The company is pitching “AI factories” that let institutions train its open-weight model on their own data, and is testing a sovereign AI partnership with South Korea’s Shinsegae Group. Reflection says it will release Beam’s weights and full technical details this month, under an Apache 2.0 licence, with distribution through hyperscalers and neoclouds.

Source: TechCrunch | Reflection AI blog | SiliconANGLE

Photo: Victor Grigas (Victorgrigas) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (resized)

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